In fall 1945, Dorothy Young, dean of women at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, held a tea to introduce the few women enrolled in engineering to each other. The upperclass students had important information to pass along to their younger peers, the most important being that there were no women’s restrooms in the engineering building. Also, the machine shop could only be accessed through the men’s locker room, requiring the women to loudly sing “She’ll be Coming ’Round the Mountain” as they approached to avoid embarrassing encounters with their male classmates.
Thankful for the camaraderie and inside information to help them succeed in the male-dominated field, the students formally petitioned Drexel to create an official student organization in 1946, called the Society of Women Engineers. They were unaware that another, ultimately short-lived student group calling itself the Society of Women Engineers had formed the same year at the University of Colorado.

Meanwhile, working women engineers began networking in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. After a few false starts, the group in New York formally organized yet another Society of Women Engineers in 1949, this one an organization for engineering graduates but with close ties to the women engineering students at The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and other schools in the city. The independent organizations became aware of each other when the SWE group at Drexel sent invitations to a number of universities along the East Coast for a 1949 conference for women engineering students.
On May 27 and 28, 1950, more than 60 women engineers and students from these disparate groups gathered at The Cooper Union’s Green Engineering Camp in Ringwood, New Jersey. The registration packet explained that the panel discussion on the first day, “Open Your Own Door to an Engineering Career,” was intended to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” Although posed in the context of attendees’ careers, the question also alluded to their larger goal for the meeting: to form a single organization for both women engineering students and professionals — a unified Society of Women Engineers.

During the business meetings that followed, the founders elected Beatrice Hicks as the Society’s first president, set membership dues, and established what are now the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore/Washington professional sections of SWE. They drafted objectives for their new organization and formed committees to begin the hard work of building a united, national Society.
The founding members’ aspirations were large, but their success was not assured in an age with so few women engineers. Still, Miriam “Mickey” Gerla, president of the early group in New York and a founding member and future president of SWE, found reason to hope for the Society’s success.
In a 1952 letter considering both the nascent Society’s past and its future, Gerla wrote, “I believe the great number of groups all desiring to form a ‘Society of Women Engineers’ through the years may be considered an excellent indication of the need for such a Society. It is only if we exist through the formative years of the Organization that we will have done better than the previous groups who failed.”

See the Archives Come to Life!
You can watch SWE archivist Troy Eller English, a dynamic and enthusiastic speaker, present photos, artifacts, and inside information on SWE’s founding in this episode of Inside the SWE Magazine Scrapbook, part of SWE’s YouTube channel.